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IEEE Looks At Kevin Costner's Oil Cleanup Machines
richardkelleher writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look at the machines developed by a company funded by Kevin Costner that are supposed to extract the oil from the Gulf waters. Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?"
Though much maligned, Waterworld did make a surprisingly decent profit in the end: $175m cost, with awful reviews and a mere $116m gross box-office in the US, but another $176m worldwide and pretty good DVD receipts as well.
So I suppose it's feasible Costner had a little left over for water-cleaning tech ;)
If you throw enough Linguini at the wall eventually something will stick.
You will never get anything to stick to the wall if you never try.
This is why freaks like RMS end up achieving something and the rest of us "sensible" people just end up as corporate drones.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well why should they? They only have to look after the interest of the shareholders and thats maximising Profit Baby!*
* may not be true but thats how it seems to be in practice.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit. That's how it works. They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money. I wouldn't really expect a corporation to invest money into something like developing technology to clean up oil spills unless it could demonstrate that the technology would somehow earn the shareholders money.
You could make the argument that if BP (or Exxon or whoever) developed the technology they'd be able to sell it to others... Or minimize the fines/cleanup that they have to pay for... But, the way things actually work in the real world, there's little point in that. Business as usual makes more than enough money.
Which is why, much as some people hate to admit it, some kind of government involvement is necessary.
You can regulate the oil companies - force them to invest some amount of their profits into cleanup R&D.
Or you can fund your own R&D project to develop the technology.
But, as we've seen, The Market isn't interested in this stuff.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
The machines seem to work well enough in tests; enough for BP to lease 32 of them right off the bat.
TFA states that the machines are capable of separating 99% of the oil out of the water under ideal conditions, which would be soon after the oil began mixing with the water. Weeks/Months of time since the spill began, though, the water and oil mix becomes a frothy mousse which is more difficult to separate.
I hope that the machines are still capable of collecting the oil from this mousse, even if at a slower pace than the more freshly mixed oil.
I have done work with Allmaritim and trialed and tested their NOFI Oil Spill equipment equipment in New Zealand and this technology is neither new nor invented by Kevin Costner. It is very sophisticated equipment and has been around for a long time. Are we supposed to think that nobody has been working on oil spill tech until Kevin came on the scene and said "hey we should do something about this" we also do work with Slickbar another spill tech company http://www.allmaritim.com/ http://www.slickbar.com/ if you go to their websites you'll find their kit is being used in the gulf, the company Kevin has something to do with, make centrifuges, you've got to collect the oily water first before you can separate it. You take Kevin Costner out of the story and the story is about some kind of cool oil separating centrifuges, not Kevin rushing in to save us from the oil which, we had in the meantime, been twiddling our thumbs and staring at.
It's not that noone's ever made machines like this; many have, and the "industry leader" is a company called Prosep from Canada.
Keep in mind that using these machines, as long as they're not absolutely perfect, violates the Clean Water Act, which mandates perfection so strongly that 95% solutions are penalized. The bureaucracy sat around for a couple months basically trying to decide whether to ignore the fact that Costner's machines, while good, violate their rules, more or less, which is why these machines are (as another poster pointed out) used much more outside the US than within it.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
'The dude dropped too much acid back in the 70's . . . he hears voices . . . and has hallucinations about baseball fields, and shit . . .'
Yeah, stay away from that stuff. I had a really bad trip a few months back - ended up in a movie theatre where they must have been showing 'Dances With Wolves', but it looked like all the Sioux had changed into weird blue aliens who were COMING OUT OF THE SCREEN at me. Someone gave me a pair of shades but they just made it worse. Crazy shit.
I seem to remember that a ship sank on the set of Waterworld, and they had to pay a tonne of money to clean up the resulting debris and spills. I can see how that lesson would have been a driver for developing a technology to make it cheaper. Scratch that itch!
I worked on Waterworld, like half the people in Hollywood. What sank was that artificial island they built. I wasn't on set at the time but it was a mess and cost them months. They also shot the first two or three months without a final script so they mostly shot guys riding around on jet skis. That why there's so much footage of those. It was the most waseful shoot I was ever on.
It's called the "Unreasonable Man Paradox"
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....
1,830 years
to process that amount of water.
And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.
Your calculation is about 3 orders of magnitude too high:
(17000 square miles * 10 feet) / (100000 * 200 gallons per minute) = 3.37035066 years
But taking into account how much is far below 10 feet deep (as you mentioned), it would take quite a long time.
It was a really good paper.
The "real" problem with the centrifuges that Costner invested in is that they can't possibly flow enough water to put a dent in the Gulf Oil Spill. The IEEE article's calculation of the centrifuge's capacity assumes they're basically sticking a hose right on top of the oil spill, which is hardly realistic. Even assuming that the majority of the oil spilled is in the first 3 inches of water, a 1 mile by 1 mile area would need to have 50 million gallons filtered. 3 of the centrifuges could process 600,000 gallons per day, and so would take 83 days to complete a 1 mile x 1 mile x 3 inch deep volume of water. With an oil spill covering roughly 8,000 square miles, 700,000 days would be required. So under ideal conditions (all the oil was concentrated in one spot and easy to collect), it would take over 6000 centrifuges to process the "ideal spill" in one year. I think the centrifuges could be quite useful for filtering small, localized areas (protected wetlands, beaches, coves, etc), but the open ocean is just so massive that no device could effectively take care of it. In my opinion, a solution leveraging nature itself would be ideal.
I doubt it. If recent events in the business world have proven anything it's that modern companies exist to maximise the remuneration of management. Shareholders, stakeholders, customers and the existence of the company itself all come in second to making sure the executive officers get vast salaries, bonuses and exit packages.
May the Maths Be with you!
They can when those tarballs are on the sand. Check out the machines from Beach-tech. These machines use mesh to 'sift', and do not 'rake'. Raking breaks up the tarballs undesirably.
An interesting factoid is these machines work much better at night in the dark, because the colder temperature coagulates the tarballs better for easier removal.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.